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Vietnam was a mistake - one that we learned much from but one that we also have largely forgotten.
On the one hand, fighting in Vietnam slowed down communism from spreading to the rest of Indochina (which it did after we left). On the other hand, the end result was little to none - Vietnam ironically helped patrol the area against the Khmer Rouge for instance.
An interesting proposal would have been that we should have set our defensive border not at the parallel between South and North, but rather at the Cambodia and Laos border. There, we would've had better terrain to fight on as well as a indigenous population that hated the Vietnamese.
The war within Vietnam itself was unwinnable for it was a South Vietnam that was hardly democratic and had little support of its own people. With political factors put in to limit this war, there was no way we could have won. Had we not withdrawn, the war honestly could've dragged on into the 80's even if the country didn't implode then.
It was truly the most divided and chaotic time in American history since the Civil War a hundred years earlier.
I think what hurts most of all is not only the fact that after years of fighting and literally destroying an entire country, millions of soldiers came home from the fighting there with wounds slow to heal (if at all) and a country that gave them no parades, no honors, nothing.
The fact that they didn't get honored in a parade until the Gulf War, 16 years after the war in Vietnam was over, is pretty telling.
I don't think forgetting the war does anything - rather than let it turn into another Korea, people should remember the war and learn from it.
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